Chapter 18 Violet
VIOLET
Elio looks up when Matt walks into the kitchen, his eyes tracking Matt's steps to the fridge as he pulls out a carton of orange juice and pours himself a glass.
His gaze feels charged somehow, like he's trying to crack Matt in half and see what's hiding inside. But it's Matt we're talking about. A goofy teacher who quotes Shakespeare and tells bad jokes. There's nothing to crack.
Or it could be jealousy, because as soon as Matt walked in Elio's hand found the small of my back, pulling my chair closer to his.
And look, I grew up with two brothers. I know what male jealousy looks like when it has a shape.
Danny slamming doors. Sean going quiet for three days straight and pretending nothing's wrong until it leaks out sideways over something stupid, like who left the milk out.
Those are shapes I can work with. Shapes I can name.
This isn't that.
This is subtler. Like a crack running behind drywall where you can't see it. The kind you only catch because the paint's buckled a quarter inch and the door frame doesn't sit right anymore. The structure looks fine. The structure is not fine.
It's worse at dinner when we all sit at the long table in the formal dining room.
It's not the same room I've had dinners with Elio in, that seems like a lifetime ago.
This room is lit up by candles because two of the women still flinch at overhead fluorescents.
Elio noticed it without being told, and had every overhead fixture in the dining room switched off within the hour.
That's the man I'm falling hard for. The one who notices fluorescent lights make trafficking survivors flinch and fixes it without a word.
That man sits at the head of the table. Matt sits across from me, four seats down.
Matt tries. He always tries. It's one of the things that makes him Matt.
He asks Elio about the investigation into the trafficking network, whether there's been progress tracing the supply chain.
Good questions. Informed questions, the kind a smart man asks when he's genuinely trying to understand the world he's landed in.
"We've identified several intermediary contacts," Elio says. "Valente is coordinating with our people in Catania to trace the financial thread."
It's a complete answer, offered without hesitation. And absolutely nothing behind it. Like talking to a beautifully designed building with no one inside. Every window lit, every surface polished, every structural element in place. No one home.
Matt absorbs this. His fork pauses for maybe half a second, before he pivots to lighter ground.
He tells a story about the time his JV basketball team lost to a school whose gym was so small the baseline was literally the wall, and a kid knocked himself out on a fast break.
The women at the table don't all understand the words, but they understand his voice, the rhythm of it, the way his hands move when he talks.
Maria laughs, and then Lucia, and then the young girl whose name is Ella makes a sound that might be the first laugh she's produced in months.
The table warms. Matt does that. He's a space heater for damaged people. Throws off warmth without trying.
Elio's mouth curves. The appropriate response at the appropriate moment. A social smile with the structural integrity of wet cardboard.
I push a piece of bread around my plate. My stomach's been off all day and the bread tastes like nothing.
That's all this is. Jealousy. The man who controls everything can't stand that he can't control this.
I tell myself that with the confidence of a woman who's almost entirely sure.
And it keeps happening. The next morning I find Matt at the kitchen counter making coffee, his back to me as he measures freshly ground beans, and Elio stiffens beside me.
I feel it before I see it. His whole body going taut, his eyes locking onto Matt with the specific attention of a man committing something to record.
The way I've seen him study architectural plans, or financial documents, or the faces of men who were caught doing something he didn't like.
Detailed. Thorough. Already past information-gathering and deep into something else.
I step sideways. Make sure he can see that I see him watching.
He doesn't look away. Doesn't flinch. Just holds my gaze for a beat, his face perfectly neutral, and then moves past me down the hallway without a word.
That afternoon I'm on the terrace with a glass of water, watching Matt in the garden below, helping two of the women carry supplies from the kitchen outbuilding. Easy laughter drifts up. Matt's, and then one of the women's, lighter, uncertain, like she's remembering how the sound works.
Elio appears beside me. Stands at the railing, his eyes on Matt. That same look on his face. His knuckles whiten around the railing before he turns around without a word and goes back inside.
I stand on the terrace alone and look down at Matt laughing in the garden with a bag of flour tucked under one arm, trying to figure out what it is that Elio sees. I fail.
A dead bougainvillea bloom clings to the railing. I snap it off, crush it between my fingers.
It's just jealousy. There's nothing else that fits.
The next day Matt sits across from me at lunch, talking through the logistics of eventually going home. The flights, the bureaucratic nightmare of replacing a passport, what his building super will have done with a month of mail piling up outside his apartment.
"She's definitely adopted my fern by now," he says. "She already killed my basil plant, Gerald, while I was at work one summer. Just took him. and repotted him. He was dead in a week."
"She murdered Gerald?"
"In cold blood. Didn't even apologize. Said he was 'struggling' and she was 'intervening.'" He shakes his head. "Gerald was doing fine. Gerald was thriving."
I laugh so hard my belly aches, my right hand moving across the table to cover his while I wipe off the laughter tears with my left.This is the first time I laughed since I found about Elena, and I will be eternally grateful to Matt for giving me this moment.
Matt's eyes flicker behind me and I don't have to turn around to know that Elio must be watching. I leave my hand where it is.
That evening I'm on the terrace watching stars when I spot Matt acting all weird. He's walking toward me but his approach is all wrong, close to the wall, checking the doorway behind him.
"Hey." His voice is light, too light. The Matt equivalent of Elio's social smile. Correct shape, wrong material.
"Hey."
He leans against the railing beside me, facing the glass doors instead of the garden. His eyes keep moving past my shoulder to the interior of the house.
"So." He exhales. Rubs the back of his neck. "I don't want to make this weird."
"You're already making it weird. Just say it."
A pause. Then, quieter. "I don't think your boyfriend likes me, Vi."
I wince. As much as I want to reassure him that isn't true, I've started to consider that option as well.
"I mean..." His jaw works. "He watches me constantly.
Not the way he watches everyone. That I can handle.
I've had principals with less intimidating energy and that's saying something, because my department chair once made a grown man cry over a parking space.
" The joke falls flat and he knows it. He lets it die. "This is different. This is... weird."
My fingers tighten around the railing. The iron is cold and rough under my palms.
"I know what he is, Violet. I know what men like him do when they decide someone's a problem." His voice is low, but his eyes keep doing that thing, the constant tracking, the doorway check. "I'm not trying to cause trouble. I just..."
"You're not causing trouble."
"I think I should leave. Like, as soon as possible."
"You're not going anywhere," I say. "I'll talk to him."
"Vi..."
"He knows how important you are to me. He knows what you did. What you gave up." My voice is steady. My chest is not. "He's just... this is how he processes. He controls things. It's what he does. But I have a say in this, and I'm saying you stay."
Matt looks at me. That warm, open, average face that is the opposite of everything Elio is. Kind eyes. The only kind eyes in the compound.
"Especially now that Elena..." I stop.
Just. Stop. Like someone cut the wire. Because there's no way to finish it that doesn't rip the wound back open, that doesn't make it real again, that doesn't put me back in that room where she sat with dead eyes and told me some cages never open, and she was right, she was right, and now she's...
Matt's hand closes around mine on the railing.
He doesn't push. Doesn't fill the silence. Doesn't offer a Shakespeare quote or a bad joke or any of the tools in his kit. He just waits. Holds my hand and waits for me to come back from wherever the sentence took me.
I breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way Elena taught me in the compound, which is a thing I can never think about without...
"Just." My voice is stripped down to nothing. "You're staying. That's all."
Elio is in the study when I look for him that night. Papers spread across the desk, the lamp throwing warm light across his hands. I don't want to fight. I just want to understand and maybe explain my side.
He looks up when I walk in, his eyes softening at the edges.
"Violet." He almost smiles.
I try not to wring my hands and fail miserably.
"Do you not like Matt?" I blurt out.
Elio tilts his head, studying my posture, the nerves clearly showing on my face and sets his pen down, leaning back in his chair and patting his lap for me to come sit.
I do, because I need his warmth to hear whatever he's going to tell me.
"He concerns me."
"He's a high school teacher from Connecticut."
"He's a man I don't know living in my house with access to the people I'm responsible for."
"He's a man who took beatings for me. Who bled for me. Who..."
"I know what he did," he says quietly.
"Then why are you watching him like he's a threat?"
Elio sighs, his arms wrapping around my mid section as he buries his head in the crook of my neck. "I need you to trust me."
"I do trust you."
"No matter what."
I scrunch up my face in confusion, pulling his face from my neck to read his expression. His eyes are pleading for me to understand, despite not giving me any answers.
"No matter what?" I repeat.
"No matter what."
I'm silent, unable to decide if this is jealousy speaking, or if it's more serious, something he's just not ready to tell me yet. I feel like I'm about to sign a contract with the devil without being able to read it first. Am I ready to give my soul blindly to Elio Marchetti? I'm not sure.
But then his hand comes up and his fingers trace my jaw, and his eyes crack open just enough to show me what's underneath. Raw. Scared. So deeply, viciously his. And the thing in me that's in love with him overrides everything else
"Okay," I say. "No matter what."
He presses his forehead to mine. His eyes close. His breath is warm on my mouth and his hand is shaking. Just barely. Just enough that I can feel the tremor where his fingers rest against my neck.
And then he pulls back. Kisses my forehead.
"Go to sleep, tesoro," he murmurs. "I'll be with you soon."